360 Disc Scratching Serious Problem

Though Microsoft has previously stated that a reported problem where Xbox 360s may be scratching game discs was relatively rare, it's apparently common enough that rental agency GameFly has an official policy on the problem. From Gamasutra: "We have received reports that certain XBOX 360 consoles have caused damage to GameFly videogames. Unfortunately, we have been notified that you recently returned a damaged XBOX 360 game. As a precaution, we have removed all XBOX 360 games from your GameQ. Please contact Microsoft at 1-800-4MY-XBOX. Please do not rent XBOX 360 games until you have resolved this issue. In the future, should GameFly receive XBOX 360 games from you that have been damaged, you will be charged a replacement fee."

More problems?

[LoRdTAW]

And I thought Microsoft has enough of a back eye with faulty power supplies, bad consoles and some people even having defective accessories like the hdd and wireless controllers. This 360 roll out looks to be seriously rushed in order to get a one up on Sony. Unfortunatly they keep tripping over there own feet.

Same thing happened with the original Xbox...

[EvilCabbage]

... gave them a huge black eye in the japanese market they never really recovered from over there.

Sucks to be in Microsoft hardware right about now, thought they would have learned their lesson five fucken' years ago.

Re:simple solution..

[alexhs]

Only one comment and someone already came with the same point I would have written...
But I don't think it's funny, it's just the normal use of a backup copy...
GameFly shouldn't charge its customers but instead ask the game editor for a disk replacement. After all, they're not buying discs but licenses, right ?

Seems like a fair, user-friendly policy

[MadCow42]

I'd continue doing business with them anyways. They're making the user aware of a real problem, but not charging them for the first damaged disc(s). It's only fair that damages after they're made aware of the issue are chargeable.

Most companies would charge for the first discs too - after all, it's the rental company that's most likely to have to swallow the cost (unless Microsoft coughs up... how likely is that to a rental house?).

Kudos to them...

MadCow.

Why all the bad press?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes I wonder if a competing company is behind some of these stories.

At a minimum, the headline of "360 Disc Scratching Serious Problem" is a little sensationalist, no?

Just because a game rental company comes up with an official policy to deal with an issue, doesn't mean that issue is a "serious problem" - usually it just means that it happened often enough that they wanted to put something down on paper to reduce support calls. (And, frankly, warning users that their consoles might be causing disk damage is a good idea. But that isn't something that's limited to the 360. PS2s have been known to scratch disks as well.)

What about posting a story about the majority of Xbox 360 users that don't have any problems, instead of the (vocal) small percentage who do? Or maybe a story about the fast turnaround time of Xbox 360 tech support? (5-7 days for a brand new / fixed console, for a friend of mine)

I can honestly say that I have not had a single problem since I got my Xbox 360 on release day. (I am waiting on some games to push the hardware to its max, but that's a separate issue.)

Yet another reason why..

[codeTurtle]

...I won't be getting a 360 til the end of it's lifecycle. It's clearly been rushed out for release to get a perceived edge over Sony (and to a lesser extent, Ninendo). I think that this means that the PS3 and the Revolution will end up being much more rounded, robust consoles - Sony and Nintendo know they're not going to be first to market, so they can afford to spend a little more time getting the consoles right. Plus hopefully there'll actually be a decent number of games available at launch... ;)

it's getting harder and harder...

[BillGod]

In these days everyone is looking for any reason to bash the giant. Make jokes and poke fun. I have been a Microsoft user since DOS 3. I have been telling people for years that most of what they hear is just hype and to ignore it. I can't seem to find it in me anymore to stick up for them. None of my computers are running IE anymore due to a 6 hour virus removal fiasco. And there is no way in hell I will purchase an xbox 360 for my house any time soon. My son keeps begging me for one. How do you explain to an 11 year old that it sucks now.. but may get better by next year?

Call be doubtful, but...

[Guppy06]

You're telling me that there are not only enough Xbox 360s out there, but there are enough of those 360 owners that are also GameFly subscribers and that enough of those people who have both a 360 and a GameFly subscription also have a disk-eating machine that they instituted this new policy specifically for 360 games?

That's what, six people?

If anything, this policy is a continuation of a standing policy for all consoles, and they probably deal with far more disk-eating PS2s than disk-eating 360s, simply because of the installed base.

And before I'm accused of being a Microsoft apologist, I am a foaming-at-the-mouth Nintendo fanboy who would only get an Xbox 360 for Final Fantasy XI.

we're screwed with blue-ray.

[User 956]

I completely agree it's not mine to copy, but it will become mine pretty damned quickly if I scratch it. And I bet I would be charged the full game price as a replacement. Maybe the rental company should have backups. Kind of makes me nervous about renting games now.

This kind of blows a big hole in the *AA's argument that all this copy protection BS is really about preventing piracy. It seems to me that more and more, it's about getting the customer to buy multiple copies of the same content.

This point is even more obvious when you look at the way the Blue-ray copy protection works [cdfreaks.com]. If you get even the tiniest scratch on the ROM MARK on the disc, the disc is UNUSABLE. Doesn't matter if the rest of the surface of the disc is pristine, your $30 movie is now worthless. (yes, $30, you know they're going to charge 2x or 3x what a normal DVD costs).

That spells it out pretty clearly. The future is downloaded movies. And music. and games. And no, I'm not talking about DRM'ed ones that you pay for.

disc condoms

[Unknown_monkey]

COMPUsa has a solution that I can't find the link to right now. It's a condom for the CD, a clear cover that goes over the data side of the disk to protect it. YMMV as I have not tried it yet. But I think that when I get a X360 I'll buy them just to improve my scratch resistance and to have something else to blame when my X360 crashes.


Construct your future, get a new job! Jobdot.org. Not affilliated with Slashdot. [jobdot.org]

Re:My sources tell me...

[jbrandv]

No. You never own the media, only a license. They should be replaced no charge. Thank RIAA!

Your absolutely right about the sensationalism

[Hercules Peanut]

What about posting a story about the majority of Xbox 360 users that don't have any problems, instead of the (vocal) small percentage who do? Or maybe a story about the fast turnaround time of Xbox 360 tech support? (5-7 days for a brand new / fixed console, for a friend of mine)

I can honestly say that I have not had a single problem since I got my Xbox 360 on release day. (I am waiting on some games to push the hardware to its max, but that's a separate issue.)

That sounds like a great idea. While we are at it, what about the national media producing stories about the majority of high school students who didn't get shot in the classroom last yeat or the majority of Americans who didn't get killed in Iraq?

I can honestly say that I have neither been shot in HS nor killed in Iraq. What's up with this sensationalism anyway?

Re:Why not?

[Retroneous]

I feel like a complete fool. Thanks for pointing out the error of my ways.

I've paid retail price (not eBay price) for an Xbox360 with PGR3, Call of Duty 2 and Condemned. I've plugged the console in, put a game in, sat down in my favourite chair - and played three incredibly addictive and FUN games. It hasn't crashed once (because I didn't lag the power supply with fourteen blankets) and it hasn't scratched a disc (because I haven't moved the console from vertical to horizontal whilst a disc is spinning) - yet.

What an idiot I am! I got to play games that I enjoyed. I must be missing the point, but I thought that was the idea of this pasttime that we call gaming. If it isn't, then somebody please show me exactly what the point is, before I "waste" even more of my money on having fun.

"and should Microsoft ever acknowledge that there is anything wrong with the game consoles, you can get a full repair/replacement" - RTFA. Microsoft DID acknowledge the problem.

Re:Why all the bad press?

[Indras]

I've heard about the scratching problem on X-Box 360s from more places than this article. If a "majority" are okay, it doesn't mean it's not a problem. If any systems are scratching disks then it's a risk. The question is, is it an *acceptable* disk? If just 5% of X-box 360s scratched disks so they became unplayable, then that's bad enough that Microsoft deserves more than just a black eye for it.

I can't help but make a comment on this. I repair machines in a plastics factory, we make parts for dashboards in various vehicles. For us, defective products are measured in PPM (and I'm sure it's the same across the industry). It's short for Parts Per Million.

We have internal PPM - scratched parts, short shots, bad paint, etc., that are caught by the operators and quality inspectors before they leave the building. More importantly is external PPM - defective parts that we didn't catch, that made it out of the building to the customer site and were rejected and sent back. Naturally, this makes our customers angry and costs us a bundle (since we pay for shipping both ways).

Just today I overheard a meeting between a line boss and his operators. He was ranting over how terrible our PPM scores were: Internal - 23,000 External - 151.

Yes, that's 151 bad parts per million that we produced and sent out of our building. That's less than 0.02% defect rate. If our external PPM ever got over 1% for a particular department (1000 parts per million), it would not be surprising to see some operators and quality inspectors fired. In my plants, a 4-digit PPM is a capitol crime.

Now, to hear that there may be 5% of XBox 360's that scratch discs makes me shudder. That's high enough for a full recall of all products while the issue was sorted out.

I'm guessing that you were just making up a figure, but you picked a rather large one.

His for the duration of rental

[CarpetShark]

Actually, it IS his copy of the game, for as long as he's rented it. Essentially, he has an unseen license with his copy. If that copy fails, the license is still valid, and he should be able to whip out another copy, and use it instead, without any problems.

However, anyone who buys an X-Box is supporting a company that wants to harm their rights, so it's a non-issue for me either way. Make your bed, lie in it.

Re:Seems like a fair, user-friendly policy

[hikerhat]

Doesn't seem so fair to me. How do they know the xbox damaged the disc? What if is was damaged by the employee who was checking it for damage, and they want to cover their ass? That's what I would do if I worked there and scratched a disc. What if it was damaged in any other way?

Now if three or four discs came back from they same customer damaged, they might have a case. But one disc?

Re:Same thing happened with the original Xbox...

[Plocmstart]

I've experienced scratching on my original XBox. The only game that's caused this was DDR Ultramix 2. You may think well you were jumping around and that caused the lens to bounce up into the disc, but after I noticed the problem on my first disc I exchanged it for another copy. I put this new disc in a second Xbox I had, started a song I knew was skipping on the other disc and just listened to the XBox instead of jumping around on the pads. This second disc caused the drive to do the same thing again. So I copied it to the hard drive of my modded Xbox just to prevent any more disc scratching (and listened to it scratch the outer edge as it copied it over. There must be some poor encoding on the outer edge of some discs that causes these drives to shove the lense right up onto the disc surface... you'd think they would test these sort of things... guess not when they're rushing a product to market.

Re:Why all the bad press?

[ivan256]

Consumer electronics has a failure rate between 3-5% (once in customer hands.)

I'm not sure what study you pulled that from, but those sound to me like the failure rates in the first year, not the number that are defective out of the box.

Re:simple solution..

[Sigma 7]

There used to be some games on the Amiga that suggested as the new owner of the game that the first thing you should do is make a copy of the game disks and play from those instead. Gunship 2000 I think was one, but I can't actually remember as I had a hard disk which made needing the disks at all unessesary. You would think I would have had a disk full of borrowed software, but you'd be wrong.

Anyone who has an Amiga would know that a massive number of copied disks is not an issue.

I had an Amiga 500 at home - while I haven't heard of as many horror stories as some other people mentioned, I do know that disks inserted into the computer have a slightly higher rate of collecting errors. Most likely, errors are caused by ejecting disks, since it seems that the drive head was originally in contact with the disk in question (and that the default OS for the Amiga is known to spontaneously read the disk suddenly.)

These aren't errors of death - it's eventually a bad sector that manifests itself after seveal months of use. When compared to IBM computers and other modern computers, the disks seem to have about half to a third of the lifespan, mainly because the drive head is in greater contact with the disk during ejection sequence.

This happened on my PS2

[ZekeSMZ]

I was one of those fools who waiting in line at 5 in the morning to be the first to get my hands on a PS2. I was lucky enough to procure one, and after a week of playing it - my Tekken Tag Team and SSX discs had circular scratches around them and were unplayable. I didn't move my PS2 while the drive was spinning - the machine just ate the discs.

Hopefully Microsoft will be a lot better about handling these repairs.

Initially, Sony wanted to charge me nearly 100 bucks for the privelege of them diagnosing the problem. (even though the machine was underwarantee). A few letters later, combined with multiple calls to the Better Business Bureau - Sony capitulated, repaired my PS2 and replaced my games.

The only downside is that when I got the game discs back in the mail, they all contained rootkits ;-)

Re:simple solution..

[pnewhook]

Well it seems that the XBox does not ship with a EULA, but Microsoft is acting like it does: http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/remotedelet e.html [sourceforge.net]

Could be a difference between U.S. and Canadian laws. Microsoft seems do be depending on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which is not applicable in Canada.

Besides, you are NOT legally allowed to build a copy of your car, that's a violation of at least the copyright on the car design, if not countless patents (which you'd get past if you bought those parts from the manufacturer but we're talking about building it yourself).

So you're saying that all of the kit car resources such as this one http://www.kitcarsales.co.uk/ [kitcarsales.co.uk] are illegal?

Re:Call be doubtful, but...

[NeMon'ess]

You're wrong. The GC uses discs approximately 3" wide instead of 5". That means there is less gyroscopic effect if the console is moved, and less chance of the disc edge grinding on the laser head. Furthermore, the console is cube shaped, but just about nobody would try to put it on it's side. So it will always be kept in a vertical orientation. Anyone moving the console while it is powered would presumably slide it over, as opposed to tilting it 90 degrees which scratches discs in the PS2 and 360.

Re:we're screwed with blue-ray.

[bani]

I don't see how they are destined to fail, when they will have the force of law behind them. The MPAA stormtroopers, authorized by congress, will police every home and make sure you are watching your daily quota of MPAA programs on MPAA authorized players. If necessary you'll be made to watch your quota clockwork-orange style, citizen. So get used to it.

So really, I can't see how they could possibly fail.